Audiophiles and ordinary listeners of music, movies, and other media forever seek that perfect recorded sound—one that fully and authentically recreates a live performance. Digitally-recorded sound is often considered superior to analog sound because of its precision and lack of distracting noise (e.g., pops, tape hiss, etc.). At the same time, many people dislike digital sound because it lacks warmth and other hard-to-quantify qualities that occur in the live, original source, or even in analog recordings.
There is thus a disconnect between digital sound recording and cognitive perception of sound. Recorded and reproduced sounds, especially digitally-recorded sound, fail to cause a listener's brain to have the same neural activity that the listener would experience while listening in-person to an original live performance for the same sounds. A general opinion among audio engineers is that sounds recorded and reproduced with analog techniques give a more lifelike reproduction than do sounds that are recorded and reproduced with digital techniques. To fix such problems, especially with digital recordings, some engineers digitally simulate the distortions of analog recording gear in their recording, such as recording tape saturation and vacuum tube non-linearities. Engineers may also add such distortions to an otherwise digital recording by inserting analog gear (e.g., analog summing busses) into the digital recording chain. In addition, recording engineers may simply increase bit-depth and sample rate in an effort to fix the problem by increasing the data content of the recording.